Q. What is Human relation movement?
The famous Hawthorne experiments by the Elton mayo and his Harvard colleagues during 1930's and 1940's demonstrated that employee productivity was affected not only by the way that the job was prepared and the manner in which the employee were rewarded economically, but by certain social and psychological factor as well. The human relations movement led to the wide scale implementation of natural science techniques in the industry for the first time which included supervisory training programmes, emphasizing support and concern for workers, programmes to strengthen the bonds between management and labour and counselling programmes whereby employees were encouraged to discuss both work and personal problems with trained counsellors. The movement was also influenced by the growing strength of the unions during the late 1930s and 1940s. The rise of unions during this period was because of the passage of the Wagner Act which gave workers the legal right to bargain collectively with employers over matters concerning, wages, benefits, job security and many other conditions of the work.